Lloyd Evans
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I ask Thompson if the material aroused much hostility. ‘I didn’t bump into anybody who was violently horrible, thankfully, but I’m sure there were people who took umbrage.’ And are the producers anxious about ploughing their hard-earned cash into such a risky venture? ‘I expect they will be,’ she says simulating horror. ‘In the early hours of the morning they’re probably going, “Ooh, my Gawd!”’
I’m amazed to hear that once the three-month run finishes she has no more work lined up. ‘I’d love to be able to say I pick and choose like a loon. But I don’t, Lloyd, it’s not how it works for me. Things come up and I think mmm, maybe. Never had a scheme. Terribly random. That’s the way I operate. I have thought at times I ought to be a bit more structured in my approach but it doesn’t seem to have worked.’
Her vagueness and self-doubt seem a little mannered on the page, but face-to-face she’s perfectly natural and sincere. Her self-effacement is unusually pronounced and has filtered into every part of her life. When I ask at what stage she realised she could make a career in acting she demurs. ‘I don’t think I ever thought with that word, “career”. I think I always wanted to be an actor — sounds a bit boring, doesn’t it? — and I pretended once that I wanted to be a vet because one of the teachers asked me and saying you want to be an actor sounds a little bit silly. And I do still feel a bit silly saying it. You feel a bit fraudulent.’
Which is almost perverse given her background. Her mother Phyllida Law is an actor, her sister is Emma Thompson, and her father Eric wrote and voiced The Magic Roundabout. She helped. ‘At home he had a huge reel-to-reel thing, with a screen, and he’d sit there with a big pad making up the script as he went along. I used to sit on the floor and there was a button. Forward. Stop. Backward. I was the controller.’
To hedge against the uncertainties of their profession her parents ran a shop in Islington. ‘They’d buy bits of battered old furniture and make them look a little nicer. Dad had done a bit of woodwork and he was pretty good at cleaning pictures.’ It sounds like an ‘antiques and restoration’ business rather than ‘bits of old furniture’. ‘No. I think it was bits of old furniture, you’ll find.’ She followed their example and ran a shop called Fish for several years before her career took off. ‘Selling what?’ ‘Children’s toys and bits of old furniture. I’d get a chest of drawers and put different handles on. I don’t do woodwork.’ I see a pattern emerging in this family. ‘Does Emma sell bits of old furniture?’ ‘No!!’ But there’s always time.
The vanity of her fellow professionals is a theme she returns to constantly and with relish. ‘I wonder what it was like to be an actor years ago. We’re so respected now and I don’t think it does us any good. We used to be vagabonds. I want to be a vagabond! Especially a woman in the theatre, are you kidding, I’m close enough to being a hooker. I’d be a lady of the night. That’s the way I’d be described. Whereas now, ooh, you know, get you, you’re an actor. And I’m embarrassed by that. We’ve gone a bit too far from our vagabond roots.’
She dismisses my suggestion that the job places performers under unique pressures. ‘Oh, that’s so Planet Actor. Everyone feels pressure. You wake up and go, Ooh, I’ve got to go to work. Same for me only my bit’s on a bit later in the day.’ ‘But there’s more riding on it,’ I say. ‘A businessman misses a meeting and he’s not letting down a thousand people who’ve paid 40 quid for a ticket.’ ‘I’d never thought about it like that. Now you’re making me tense.’
Beneath her diffidence I notice an unexpected gift for the instant soundbite. Well-turned phrases, almost like written dialogue, emerge from her quite spontaneously. On directing: ‘I don’t think I have the vision. I’d need a director to direct me directing.’ On the competing responsibilities of her job and her two sons: ‘It complicates things in a fantastic way. And you celebrate the chaos of that.’ On writing: ‘People say there’s a book in everyone but I’m not sure there is. There might be a pamphlet in me.’
I suggest that if she combined this talent with her comic ability — and she’s one of the funniest actors you’ll ever see — she could do a great solo show. She’s aghast. ‘How lonely would that be?’ But then, ‘I thought about it, when there’s no call for my services, when I can’t get employed. You’ve got to duck and dive, if you’re a vagabond. Got to have something up my sleeve. What am I going to do?’
Not massively keen, then, but not ruling it out either. This impulsive hesitancy seems to define her. When we part she tells me how much she’s looking forward to reading the interview. ‘Mind you, I don’t usually buy the New Statesman.’
Clybourne Park is at Wyndham’s Theatre until 7 May.
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